InfoWorld: NoSQL is no Oracle killer

Over time, NoSQL and big data will slow Oracle RDBMS's long-term growth, but it won't deliver a death blow anytime soon -- except, perhaps, to Oracle RAC

Like many people, I cheer any sign of Oracle's downfall and chuckle at the thought of Larry Ellison having some misadventure on the high seas. Who doesn't? But the sad fact is that, despite all the buildup, NoSQL and big data do not threaten Oracle or the RDBMS paradigm in the near term

On the other hand, there's a decent chance NoSQL will take a big bite out of Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters). Here's why.

Oracle RAC enables you to scale your application by implementing load balancing and high availability across multiple nodes. It scales well for your everyday read-mostly-mostly (the second "mostly" is deliberate) clusters but not as well when you have a few more writes. To support more nodes, it must coordinate a write-lock across the network.

To take advantage of RAC, you need to write your application very well and very carefully. For the majority of applications, the cost of that development (or the horsepower to run less carefully written apps) will be high.

RAC your world, for a price

About 1 percent of systems experience backbreaking traffic, and in cases that demand high transaction throughput, RAC may well make sense. But RAC doesn't add up for the remaining 99 percent.